Floral beauty captured with detail and love

Foster artist Svea Chang with her intricately detailed paintings of Australian native flora.

Foster artist Svea Chang has fallen completely in love with Australia’s native flowers and she captures their natural beauty in truly exquisite detail.

Her painting of flowering gum blossoms won the People’s Choice Award at the 2019 Sandy Point Easter Art Show, while another of the four works she had on display there, also of flowering gum blooms and leaves, was sold.

Currently Svea has eight of her floral pieces on the walls of Moo’s at Meeniyan restaurant, until Sunday July 28, 2019.

She has also had paintings in two shows held at the Stockyard Gallery in Foster this year, including the Volunteers Exhibition and the Lost Landscape Exhibition.

Svea and her husband, local pharmacist Chi Chiu, have lived in Foster for the past three years. Since their arrival Svea has spent a lot of time wandering around the town, “fascinated” as she says, “by the colour and the elegance of the flora”.

Her walks have become even more regular, longer and go further afield since the birth of the couple’s daughter Ellie 14 months ago.

‘Whenever I go walking, I always find inspiration in the native flowers and plants,” Svea said.

“I stand in front of trees and flowers looking at them for a long time to see the details and people ask me what I am doing, so please don’t be surprised if you see someone standing there!”

Svea was born in Taichung City in Taiwan and has a bachelor’s degree in visual communication design from the Chao Yang University of Technology in Taiwan.

She said there never seemed to be much chance for her to paint after she graduated as she had, “studied for a long time, then work, very busy going to work, then sleep, work, sleep!

“When I came to Australia, I had not seen the native flowers before, and they attracted my eye.

“Then one day my phone was broken and I couldn’t take photos anymore,” Svea said.

“Then I started thinking ‘why don’t I draw it to keep it for my memory, and that’s how my painting started again!”

Svea said she has found living in such a different culture to her own and away from her Taiwanese family and friends has been hard, but she has been taking English as a second language classes at the Manna Gum Community House in Foster.

Chi has helped her to work on her art full time in between looking after Ellie, as has the growing number of her Australian friends, including her art group.

“My friends encouraged me to use art to say my emotion, so I started to involve myself in the art,” she said.

“I like painting in acrylic because oil paint takes too long to dry.

“I paint at night when Ellie is in bed, and before the exhibition I painted to four in the morning to be finished,” Svea said. “Once I didn’t sleep for 24 hours!

“I like big paintings and I like the detail of the flowers. My art is full of detail,” she said.“It’s lovely to live in Foster, so many beautiful things can be explored and painted!”

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